I don’t normally talk about where I work on this blog but for once I thought I’d break the mould  as our company blog has a really interesting piece about our Flying unit.   I believe the camera we use on the aircraft shown would not  give you much change out of £1,000,000 .

The  accuracy of much of the work we deliver these days is just a few  centimetres, just as well when  you are digging up the road for gas and water pipes….

You can read the full story here..

 

Back in May I mentioned about how I was tracking commercial airliners by direct reception of the mode-S transmissions used in many (but not all) aircraft. I’ve since discovered that you can now track many aircraft online using a free site called planefinder.net.  I have no idea if the tracks are time delayed (I hope they are for security reasons!) and the site is dependant on mode-S hobbyists sharing their data to all (so expect the odd gap), but chances are if you are about to whizz on your hols or business trip you’ll be able to track your flight.

Just for good measure iPhone and iPad versions are also available….

 

This is a clip from a recent presentation delivered by Ian Painter with his humorous take on the current state of the GIS Industry (or as Armstrong and Miller might put it “that’s like Geography and maps and all that shit man“)

The two groups of people Ian is referring to are:

Neogeographers -- ‘new age‘ geographers who are very much in to Web 2.0,  sometimes perceived as having a ‘relaxed‘ attitude to intellectual property and more perceptive to open sourcing.  Some think these these folks probably wouldn’t have looked out of place in the days of flower power.

and…

Paleotards -- the more traditional GIS Industry that’s been around almost since time began that does everything by the book crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s with high degrees accuracy and sometimes perceived as taking a simple task and making it absurdly complicated.

( and If I’ve got this wrong I’m sure someone will correct me here..zzzz)

If you’ve worked in IT for a kazillion years like me you’ll notice Ian covers some familiar topics in his brilliant talk.

 

If (like me) you’ve been try to get Stephen Ollis’s WordPress plugin for Google Latitude working and failing miserably check you badge number in the html code, mine has a - in front it.

<!– Google Public Location Badge –>
<iframe src=”http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=-8716246790221957302&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap”  etc. etc .–>

Kutos to Steve for tracking this annoying little critter down.

 

So this evening the dearest and I decided to pop out and see the new Star Trek Movie. No doubt some critics will pan this movie just like they did Mama Mia (yeh right..) but as someone who watched the original Star Trek series in the late 60′s first time around (in black & White on BBC 2) I was suitable impressed, it ticked the the right boxes for me and, an old fart who even today watches at least 5-7 Star Trek episodes a week mostly on an iPod Touch in bed (SAD or what?). 

The movie was disturbingly dare I say historically correct including a reference to Jonathan (Admiral) Archer with the notably exception that Captain Pike should have wound up a paraplegic (though it’s not hard to see why the Director used a bit of artistic licence in this case.)

Looking behind the scenes (corporately referred to to as underpinning) what also impressed me was when I typed in Star Trek the Movie to Google the first hit showed me how where the movie was playing locally and how to buy tickets.. an excellent example of GIS engines strutting their stuff .  It doesn’t always have to be a colour map that shows me how to get somewhere, it doesn’t have to be a set of driving instructions, this time it was just a finger pointing to where the movie was playing and how I could queue-jump the great unwashed by purchasing tickets online with my flexible friend, that’s all I needed.

I’m guessing the younger generation might say “yeh.. and your point is..?” but to me (to coin a rather corny phrase) is the power of GIS though these kids who will be paying my pension in 15 years time would expect nothing less….

 

Funny how you sometimes miss stuff that is right under your nose.

iOSMaps is a case in point – a natty little free iphone/iPod Touch app that displays Ordnance Survey OpenSpace data and does all the whizzy postcode and place name search bits too.

OK, so it’s lacking in the imagery views you’ll seen in other iPhone viewers but considering this has been written as a freebie I thought it was rather neat.

Futher details at the explore portal..

 

21:54 – And hello to Ed in California, shucks I’m no longer Billy no mates….

Minor teething troubles -  according to Duncan whose been watching me this evening I’ve managed to travel from the New Forest to Germany and back in just over 90 minutes, to me it just seemed like a trip to local Gym, guess I’m stronger than I thought.

(Ed, get the beers lined up, I might fly over later this evening!)

Joking aside this has got to be one mother of a tool for a small company that wanted to managed it’s sales force or Engineers on the road, the possibilities are endless, parents tracking kids or in my case kids tracking parents.  I suspect the amount of data sent is miniscule so costs will be next to nothing but I’ll work it out later and publish it in a future post.

(Twitter for grown-ups maybe?)

 

If you know me and fancy having a play with google’s Latitude service please PM me your gmail account address so I can send you an invite or visa versa, currently I am Billy no mates!

18:54 – well that worked, hello to Duncan, John C and Rob in Kent!

 

‘Simes’ sent me a link to Walk Score today, a site that promotes healthy living by suggesting places to walk to.

Living on the Western side of Southampton water I typed in my post code and Walk Score suggested  a number of nearby places that I could walk to.. providing I didn’t mind a quick swim!

Still a good mashup though.

 

I’d mentioned back in September 2008 that google maps has found my location by triangulating against some local WiFi access points which had previously been geo-tagged by technology such as Skyhook.

Nokia Research in Helsinki appear to be following a similar path to a point where you can theoretically gecode people and moving objects!

(No doubt we’ll be barcoding our kids next..)